(Arthur) Leslie Morton (1903 - 1987) was a prolific English Marxist historian. He worked as an independent scholar; from 1946 onwards he was the Chair of the Historians Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He is best known for his classic A People's History of England, but he also did valuable work on William Blake and the Ranters, and for the study The English Utopia. He was born in Suffolk, and studied at the University of Cambridge from 1921 to 1924.

PropertyValue
dbpprop:abstract
  • (Arthur) Leslie Morton (1903 - 1987) was a prolific English Marxist historian. He worked as an independent scholar; from 1946 onwards he was the Chair of the Historians Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He is best known for his classic A People's History of England, but he also did valuable work on William Blake and the Ranters, and for the study The English Utopia. He was born in Suffolk, and studied at the University of Cambridge from 1921 to 1924. There he encountered socialist ideas, possibly from the communist group that formed around Maurice Dobb. Later he taught at A. S. Neill's school Summerhill. He belonged to a group of London left-wing intellectuals of the 1930s, while working as a journalist for the Daily Worker. His friends at that time included A. L. Lloyd and Maurice Cornforth; he assisted Victor B. Neuburg. In 1932 and 1933 he was involved in a debate with F. R. Leavis, in the pages of Scrutiny. His 1938 A People's History Of England was adopted quasi-officially as the CPGB national history, and went through later editions on that basis. He was part of the group of leading communist historians invited to Moscow in 1954/5, with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and the Byzantine historian Robert Browning.
dbpprop:hasPhotoCollection
dbpprop:otherpeople4Property
  • Les Morton
  • the historian
  • the racewalker
dbpprop:wikiPageUsesTemplate
rdf:type
rdfs:comment
  • (Arthur) Leslie Morton (1903 - 1987) was a prolific English Marxist historian. He worked as an independent scholar; from 1946 onwards he was the Chair of the Historians Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He is best known for his classic A People's History of England, but he also did valuable work on William Blake and the Ranters, and for the study The English Utopia. He was born in Suffolk, and studied at the University of Cambridge from 1921 to 1924.
rdfs:label
  • A. L. Morton
owl:sameAs
skos:subject
foaf:page
is dbpprop:redirect of
is owl:sameAs of